One thing I noticed after cycling across North America on a $500 hybrid and then Colombia on a $200 utility bike was that there is a wildly different class of cyclist that rides with computers and carbon fiber and shiny jerseys... They were as baffled by my setup as I was by theirs. It's almost an entirely different category of transportation. Or perhaps it isn't so much a form of transportation for them, it's a hobby - they often drive their bikes to the place they want to ride instead of just riding the in-between.
I imagine there is room to cater to both types of cyclist. Perhaps it was a self-selecting group for me, but I found every mechanic I visited on the road to be most busy with repairs of low-tech gear. It seems to me that low-tech bikes will continue to make up the long tail for many years to come, even if catering to those customers is less lucrative.
Yeah, there's a difference between utility riders and hobby riders. You wouldn't be able to keep up on my Saturday rides on a hybrid unless you've got world-tour legs. The riding position and gearing are just not intended for go-fast go-far riding.
You don't really even see many hybrids on large-scale charity rides, at least in the US. And yeah, quite often people do load up bikes to drive to a ride. I guess for transportation riders this sounds weird, but if you live in location A and the you want to do a group ride at location B that's 20 miles away (not unusual in a big urban area), then I'm not sure what else you'd do.
I'm likely going to a ride out in the southwestern suburbs here in Houston on Saturday, for example. The start is 23 miles from my house, and there's not a great cycling-friendly way to get there, so I'll load up and drive.
I do share your concern about long-term use. We're far enough into the electronic shifting era that early systems are falling out of the support window. Shimano's earliest Di2 systems were only 10-speed, for example; I imagine finding replacement rear derailleurs for that system is nearly impossible now, but OTOH lifespan of a rear derailleur is pretty long.
The version of SRAM's eTap on my bike is 11-speed; it's been updated since, so new bikes come with a 12-speed version called AXS. I don't know if I could easily get a replacement derailleur for mine, but TBH I also wonder that about the mechanical Ultegra derailleur on my other road bike.
Heh, I got an all road bike mostly because of the annoying headwind and the fixed hand positions on the hybrid.
You can usually find older mechanical parts on ebay or even NOS or just use a newer Ultegra or 105 if it's still 11 speed.
I'm still on mechanical parts, the all road bike is on 10 speed GRX.
Mostly never drive to ride, only if I have to ride more than 50 km away and the route is bike hostile. People drive their mountain bikes to the trailhead in my area though.
I also never race. What I sometimes do is randomly pick some roadies and try to keep up with them. What actually happens is ending up keeping up with some girl on a nondescript hybrid who has dropped the roadies.
Yeah, me either. But the city I live in is geographically huge (Houston), so if I want to ride with Group X in a given suburb, it's gonna involve a long drive first.
OTOH, most of the time I can't be arsed to do that. My "home" groups are all inner-loop rides that I can ride to (< 5 miles from my house).
That said, if I'm looking for gravel, the best sets of gravel roads are all at least an hour from the city center. Same goes for the best MTB trails. It is what it is.
I don't think my city is quite as hostile as houston but is in the same class. I'll ride 20 miles to the start of a ride pretty often, or sometimes take the bus if the route lines up.
This is very common in urban fixed gear culture, but our rides tend to be small and ad-hoc compared to the big organized road bike ones. I've done those a few times and was actively made unwelcome so it's not particularly surprising it's not extremely on your radar. Nonetheless my city has an active community a couple thousand strong that would consider it unusual to drive to a ride.
>I'll ride 20 miles to the start of a ride pretty often
Given that weekend road rides here often start at 0700, I'm absolutely not gonna do that. ;)
And don't get me wrong; Houston isn't nearly as hostile to cycling as it was 20 years ago. We just made the top 50 cities for bike-ability (#29!), which is recognition of the improvements we've been slowly making -- protected surface lanes are part of that, but the BIGGEST part is the large-and-growing system of trails along the bayous, some of which mesh in with rails-to-trails initiatives.
You can ride for hours on these trails with only minimal interaction with conventional streets, and they're laid in ways that make commutes viable for lots of people.
I don't think it's as binary as You make it out to be.
Just look into the ultra distance / bikepacking community. It's pretty varied when it comes to both frames and groupsets. Specially once You get into some more extreme events (e.g. Tour Divide for MTB or TransContinental for more of a road stuff, but the scene is growing pretty fast these past few years).
Personally, I'm on a 2018 steel Kona Rove (~1200Eur bike back in 2018) that I'm currently upgrading to an electronic groupset with hydro brakes. Reason for that is simple hand fatique / "cyclist's palsy" over long distances.
I also have a head unit, simply because of the GPS track that I usually try to follow. Gearing info is a bonus, but knowing the state of battery is pretty useful.
I think the kinds of people who are in a "community" is exactly the kinds of people who I would classify more as hobbyist riders. I encountered a lot of them along my travels, because I would follow random rail trails and relatively easy singletrack, then I'd meet these guys who were using a GPS and ultralight camping equipment and tires twice as fat as mine. They were amazed I could even get on the same trail they were on without any special gear in particular. No doubt, they probably traveled twice as far as I would in a day, they perhaps never got off to push up the very steep sections, and I'm sure they never had to backtrack like I did, but eh. For me I was happier to have spent around $1000 on my entire setup (including tent and sleep system) because it left enough money over that I could keep traveling for months. It's just a different way of looking at your bicycle.
With regard to the "cyclist's palsy", that was the injury that surprised me most - I was expecting to get sore legs, not hands! I found a pair of gel gloves helped a lot for cycling on terrain where I needed to keep my hands on the handlebars, but whenever I was on a flatter surface I just changed my position to lean on the bars with my elbows. Same thing when I got a bad neck crick, I just rested up for a day or two and then changed my riding position. I'm sure a better or more personally-adjusted bike would've been way more comfortable, but it wasn't impossible to ride long distances without it.
I think a lot of the specialized equipment is more about optimizing away inconveniences, which is great, but it's not really necessary outside of a race or "keeping up with the group" situation. If you want to tour solo, it's perfectly possible to just make do with whatever junk bike you have access to and adapt your route and behavior to the tools you have. I think when you start spending significant amounts of cash money on optimizing away the inconveniences, that's when you have entered a different class of cyclist. When you go to bike stores it often seems like all the cyclists are of that class, because all of the equipment for sale seems to be geared to them. But in the mechanic shops, I personally found it to be more balanced in the other direction. I guess there is a really large group of people who never go to a bike store and just buy department store bikes or reliable and easily-maintainable second-hand gear that the hobbyists have moved on from.
I get Your point with the equipment quite well. I started cycling in a post-Soviet country in the 90s. Equipment prices were a major concern, so we reused what we could. My first trips were with paper maps in plastic folios...
These days, having a reasonable job / salary, it's a trade-off in which I have much more of a choice.
GPS / head unit is a mean to have the overall route visualized. Can You substitute by a printout of major cities / crossroad names as an itinerary? Sure. Been there, done that too. Is the GPS worth 200Eur for me? Yeah, it is, just by the time I save not having to fiddle with maps on every stop.
When it comes to palsy, there isn't one silver bullet to solve it all. It's much like any RSI in that respect. Body position, muscle conditioning, stretching, general ergonomics. The electric shifting is just one of them (definitely not the first on my list). But since the cost of getting it wrong is maybe a month of limited fine motor control of my hand(s)... I really don't regret spending an extra few hundred bucks.
Does that mean I have bulk discount at Rapha? Hell no.
That's what I mean by things being less binary than "cheap mechanical bikes" vs "expensive carbon / electrical / Rapha jerseys". I know that there are plenty of people who fit one or the other case, but there's also quite a few of us who are somewhere in between.
If You'd like, maybe try checking out "Path Less Pedaled" (a youtube channel). Clickbait : "What You will see may surprise You!" ;-)
I found that OSMAnd~ and BRouter was a good middle point for accessing detailed offline maps and getting route suggestions. At first I thought I might want to mount my phone on my handlebars, but I couldn't find a cheap holder so I just left it in a bag and pulled over every now and then to consult the map. Convenient, since that was usually a good time to have a drink of water too. Plus it saved battery, which was useful in remote areas where there was no electricity to recharge at the end of the day.
To be fair, I also work in the tech industry and could afford snazzier equipment, but I leaned toward keeping everything cheap and cheerful so I didn't worry too much about it getting stolen in town, or busted up when taking some questionable cross-country "shortcut". At the end I donated all my gear to a local co-op, then bought a new bike in the next country, so it also helped me feel more free and not bound to a pricey piece of hardware. I feel like spending money makes you need to spend more money - now you need a better lock, now you need a storage unit, now you need to take your bike on the plane etc. For me that's just more stress that would get in the way of my goal, which was to travel carefree.
I get your point about the utility of electronics, though. I'm not anti-tech, I guess I just tend toward cheaper and simpler solutions unless there is a very strong motivation. I don't think I'm especially unique in that sense - I think a lot of people (even those who own bicycles) would be surprised to hear that some cyclists nowadays are using electric shifters! I'm sure at some point the tech will trickle down to the mainstream, but in the context of this thread which was about someone thinking of retiring to become a bike mechanic but worried it'll just be like retiring to do the same tech job they just left... I think that future is still far enough off in the distance that it's not something people who are thinking about retirement at the moment need to worry about.
I’m so used to the idea of electronic shifting now that it no longer seems an outlandish idea.
Other oddities include bike radar (to warn about cars approaching at speed), electronic pedals (power, pedal stroke and cadence) and electrically heated socks and gloves.
All this stuff is useful and not that expensive if you ride regularly in all weather.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but how can cycling across North America be just transportation and not a hobby? Would you have used, say, a car instead if you had one?
There are many shades of bike nerd, but in my eyes those demonstratively rejecting the tech side don't qualify any less. Take Sheldon Brown for example, he sure would have nerded with the best of them, and tech-rejected with the best of those as well.
I wanted to go on holiday to places I had never visited before, and places where public transport does not go, so I just got on my bike and went there. I don't own a car, but even if I did I don't think it would have been able to take me to all of the places a bike did. Still, at the core my hobby is traveling, not cycling.
Not Just Bikes touches on this in a video of his - how he's not a "cyclist", despite riding his bike a lot, and how the majority of his fellows in the Netherslands aren't cyclists either. He explained that they use two different words for the two groups, "fietser" for the everyday cyclers, and "wielrenner" for those who do it for sport or enthusiasm.
Yeah reading some of your sibling replies also made me think of Not Just Bikes. But rather the "Why Dutch Bikes are Better (and why you should want one)" video:
Note the timestamp. :P
This was literally the only time I had heard the word "hybrid" when discussing bikes. And it's not like I'm a stranger to bikes; I've done virtually all possible repairs one can do on a fully mechanical one at some point.
As a fellow <$500 cyclist I love these spandex cyclists, they move to the next shiny thing and unload their hardly outdated gear for way under retail just to get rid of it. Before the pandemic and all the inflated prices I was able to snag a beauty dura ace roadie from a guy who was moving in on the gravel bike craze for a few hundred dollars. If I parted out the components alone on that bike I'd be in the money, not including the frame.
I'm pretty sure the top five finishers in last year's Trans Am Bike Race were all running Di2. The elites in the ultra-endurance self-support races are probably the hybrid rider type of the two groups of cyclists you are talking about here.
I imagine there is room to cater to both types of cyclist. Perhaps it was a self-selecting group for me, but I found every mechanic I visited on the road to be most busy with repairs of low-tech gear. It seems to me that low-tech bikes will continue to make up the long tail for many years to come, even if catering to those customers is less lucrative.